Doc asked conversationally, “Heard anything about that?”

The soldier looked Doc straight in the eye and barked: “Yes, we know all about that and we’re not intimidated! But we’re not releasing any information, see?”

“Yes, I do,” Doc told him softly.

The soldier looked up from the cards. “Very well, Mr. Hagbolt, sir, I’ll phone your request to the main gate.” He backed off toward the doorway.

“You’re sure you’ve got it right?” Paul asked, repeating and amplifying it and mentioning the names of several officers.

“And Professor Morton Opperly,” Margo put in with strong emphasis.

Paul finished: “And one of our people has had a heart attack. We’ll want to bring her in the tower, where it’s warmer. And we’d like some water.”

“No, you all stay outside,” the soldier said sharply, raising the muzzle of the submachine gun an inch as he continued to back away. “Wait,” he called to Paul. “You come here.” From the darkness inside the tower he handed Paul first a loose blanket, next a half-gallon bottle of water. “But no paper cups!” he added, choking off what might have become a high-pitched laugh. “Don’t ask me for paper cups!” He drew back into the darkness, and there was the sound of dialing.

Paul returned with his booty, handing the blanket to the thin woman. The water was passed around. They drank from the bottle.

“I expect we’ll have to wait a bit,” Paul whispered. “Tm sure he’s O.K., but he’s pretty nervous. He looked all set to stand off the new planet singlehanded.”

Margo said: “Miaow could smell how scared he was.”

“Well,” Doc philosophized softly, “if I’d been all alone when I first saw the thing, but with the hardware handy, I think I’d have switched the lights off and draped myself with the hardware and shook a bit myself. We met the new planet under just about the best circumstances, I’d say — peering around for saucers and talking about hyperspace and all.”

Ann said: “I’d think if you were scared, Mr. Brecht, you’d switch on all the lights you could.”

Doc said, “My wicked idea, young lady, was that I’d be so terrified I wouldn’t want something big, black, and hairy able to see where I was, to grab me.”

Ann laughed appreciatively.

The Little Man said to them all in a small, almost unfeeling, faraway voice: “The moon is swinging behind the new planet. She’s…going away.”

Eyes confirmed what the words had said. A chunk of the moon’s rim was hidden by the purple-and-gold intruder.

Wojtowicz said: “My God…my God.”

The thin woman began to sob shudderingly.

Rama Joan said: “Give us courage.”

Margo’s lips formed the word, “Don,” and she shivered and hugged Miaow to her. Paul put his arm around her shoulders, but she moved away a little, head bowed.

Hunter said: “The moon’s in a very constricted orbit. There can’t be more than three thousand miles between their surfaces.”

The Ramrod thought: Her birth-pangs upon her, the White Virgin shelters in Ispan’s robes.

The Little Man made a cup of his hands and Rama Joan poured a drink for Ragnarok.

Colonel Mabel Wallingford said stridently: “Spike, I’ve been talking with General Vandamme himself and he says that this isn’t a problem. They’ve been letting us handle a lot of it because we were faster on the jump. Your orders have gone out approved-and-relayed.”

Spike Stevens, his eyes fixed on the twin screens showing the moon moving behind the Wanderer, bit off the end of a cigar and snarled: “O. K., tell him to prove it.”

“Jimmy, warm up the inter-HQ screen,” Colonel Mabel ordered.

The General lit his cigar.

A third screen glowed on, showing a smiling, distinguished-looking gentleman with a bald head. The General whipped his cigar out of his mouth and stood up. Colonel Mabel felt a surge of hot joy, watching him play the guilty, dutiful schoolboy.

“Mr. President,” Spike said.

“I’m not part of a simulated crisis, Spike,” the other responded, “though it’s hard to believe that’s been bothering you, considering the masterly way your gang’s been operating.”

“Not masterly at all, sir,” the General said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost Moonbase. Not a word for over an hour.”

The face on the screen grew grave. “We must be prepared for losses. I am now leaving Space HQ to meet the Coast Guard. My word to you is: Carry on!…for the duration of this…” You could sense him reaching for one of his famous polished phrases…"astronomical emergency.”

The screen faded.

Colonel Willard Griswold, his eyes on the astronomic screens, said: “Moonbase? Hell, Spike, we’ve lost the moon.”

Chapter Twelve

Don Merriam had been fifteen minutes in the body of the moon, doing much of it at two miles a second, and now the violet-and-yellow thread, after widening to a ribbon, was staying the same width, which couldn’t be good, but there was nothing to do but bullet toward it through the incredible flaw that split the moon along an almost perfect plane like a diamond tapped just right, and nothing to be but one great piloting eye, and suffer what thoughts to come that would, since he couldn’t spare mind to control them.

After the first big shove, he fired the main jet in brief bursts, aiming the Baba Yaga with the verniers.

Don Merriam was making a trip through a planet’s core. He had passed through its very center, and so far the trip had been glitter and blur and blackness and a violet thread halving a spacescreen turned milky in patches. That and an aching throat and smarting eyes and the picture of himself as a glass bee with a Prince Rupert’s Drop tail buzzing through a ripple in a stack of metal sheets miles long, or an enchanted prince sprinting down a poisoned corridor wide as his elbows — to brush a wall, what a faux pas!

Toward midpassage there had been soot-black streaks and a flash of green fire, but no guessing what made them.

The milkiness in the spacescreen, at any rate, should be erosion from the fantastic thin-armed dust swirls that at one point had almost lost him the thread.

He had lost the aftward sunlight, too, sooner than he’d hoped, and had to aim the Baba Yaga solely by the fainter purple and golden wall-glimmers, and that was deceptive because the yellow was intrinsically brighter than the purple and tempted him to stay too far away from it.

But now the violet ribbon began to narrow and he knew it was the doom of him, worse than collision course, for there came unbidden to his mind a vision of the riven halves of the moon crashing together behind him, cutting oft all sunlight, and then — in ponderous reaction and by the fierce mutual attraction of their masses moving — to crash together ahead of him, swinging through yards while he rocketed through miles, but swiftly enough to beat him to the impact point.

Then, just as he seemed almost to reach it, just as by his rough gauging he’d moon-traversed close to two thousand miles, the violet ribbon blacked out altogether.

And then, as incredible as if he’d found a life after death, he burst out of the blackness into light, with stars showing off to all sides and even old shock-headed Sol shooting his blinding white arrows.

Only then did he take in what lay straight ahead of him.

It was a great round, as big as Earth seen from a two-hour orbit. This vast, mounded disk was all radiantly violet and golden to the right, where Sol lay beyond, but to the left inky black save for three pale greenish oval glow-spots curving off the disk in the distance.

The unblurred night line between the radiant and the inky hemispheres was slowly drifting to the right as he watched, just as Sol was slowly drifting toward the violet horizon. He realized that back there in the moon he had lost sight of the violet ribbon, not because the jaws of the moon had clamped together, but simply because the night side of the planet ahead had moved over and looked down the chasm at him.